What is Neuromarketing?

Neuromarketing is a field that uses neuroscientific techniques to study how people respond to marketing stimuli. This can include things like brain imaging, eye tracking, and other methods that allow researchers to measure and analyse how people’s brains respond to different advertisements, products, or other marketing materials. Neuromarketing is a relatively new field, and it is still being developed and refined. However, it has the potential to provide insights into consumer behaviour and decision-making that are not possible through traditional marketing research methods.

Is Neuromarketing ethical?

Many scientists highlight the controversial nature of neuromarketing. It’s certainly legal, but is it ethical to manipulate people through a series of electrical impulses in the brain – shooting brand messaging from one synapse to another? If we’re hardwired in a certain way, should companies be using it against us to sell more stuff?

Some people assume that adverts might be deceptive and dishonest. Many claim that these methods influence people’s brains and encourage customers to take the desired action. On the contrary, neuromarketing advocates claim that their techniques help understand customers’ needs and desires and serve them better.

Neuromarketing companies operate ethically towards consumers – the same way regular advertising agencies do. They don’t intend to promote deceptive promises about products and create ads that control consumers’ purchasing decisions. Neuromarketers say that this approach allows customers to understand the patterns of their choices. Now that you know whether the strategy is ethical, let’s explore the reasons that might encourage you to implement it into your business.

The brains’ responses are crucial for companies since they provide they key to positioning and how to solve customer pain points. Business owners get a clear picture of customers’ needs and wants so they can aim a product or service to satisfy their requirements.

Why is neuromarketing important?

Although neuromarketing is controversial, it’s still essential for businesses. It encompasses different techniques that enable brands to understand customers’ needs and preferences in order to meet them. They can also study customers’ responses to different types of ads, campaigns, and product packaging. As a result, business owners can choose the best option among all available and improve campaigns and strategies’ effectiveness. Besides the aforementioned reasons to consider neuromarketing, you can reap even more benefits from this strategy.

1. It helps identify customers’ non-conscious responses to different ads, designs and methods to develop new unique strategies.
2. You can measure and record how how a message resonates with the audience’s needs and desires.
3. It’s possible to improve advertising campaigns and strategies by exploring the feelings and emotions particular ads, logos, phrases can trigger in customers.
4. You’re able to see how to improve customer experience by tracking what satisfies customers and increase sales.

With neuroscience’s help, marketers can identify product elements that receive a favourable response from customers and increase sales. So now that you know about the importance, it’s time to figure out how neuromarketing works.

How does neuromarketing work? 

Neuromarketing uses functional magnetic resonance imaging and electroencephalogram tools to scan people’s brains and evaluate physiological and neural signals to specific ads, packaging, design and copywriting.

The brains’ responses are crucial for companies since they provide they key to positioning and how to solve customer pain points. Business owners get a clear picture of customers’ needs and wants so they can aim a product or service to satisfy their requirements.

1. First, Marketers show ads, packaging, or product design to customers and track their reactions and brain activity. 
2. After they get responses and measure the changes, companies can decide what steps they need to take next. Brain scanning allows brands to track every brain activity such as eye movement, the change of pupils, face expression, heart rate, emotions and empower brands with customer insights.
3. Based on the given results, companies can decide how to improve their ads and content, product packaging and design, website design, and branding to hook the audience’s attention and resonate with customers’ needs.

Now that you know how neuromarketing works, it’s time to walk you through 6 useful neuromarketing techniques. 

6 Neuromarketing Techniques

To successfully implement neuromarketing, brands need special tools and neuromarketing specialists. They will empower you to use the following neuromarketing techniques. 

Eye-tracking (gaze). The technique focuses on gaze and where customers direct it. With its help, you can figure out colours, fonts, ads, designs that succeed to grab their attention. Besides, eye-tracking can also cue the objects that evoke confusion among these people. If you are interested in brand recognition, you can find out the customers’ recognition speed. This approach will tell you whether you have a high level of recognition or need to work on it to make people recall your company faster. Once you choose eye-tracking, it allows you to improve website design, packaging, and ads at a low cost. 

Although the technique is easy to manage, it won’t help you evaluate customers’ emotions. So use it with biometrics to get a more detailed analysis of your target audience. Pupillometry. This method draws conclusions based on the state of subjects’ pupils. It checks whether the pupils are dilated to assess the level of customers’ engagement. With its results, you can figure out the steps to revise ads, site design, and product packaging. The approach is relatively cheap and easy to execute. 

Facial coding. This method focuses on the facial expressions of subjects to identify emotional responses. It enables you to figure out the emotions people feel: happiness, fear, anxiety, surprise, satisfaction, etc. For a relatively cheap price, you’ll receive information that will help you improve your ad content and resonate with the audience. 

Biometrics. This technique identifies the level of engagement and the type of response (positive or negative) based on skin respiration, conductance, and heart rate. Biometrics allows you to make your ad content in accordance with people’s desires. Together with eye-tracking, it can significantly improve the ads and content you choose for them. 

Electroencephalogram. It enables you to reveal customers’ engagement and recall with the help of electrical signals that come from neurons inside the brain. This relatively expensive technique enables you to evaluate changes in short periods and improve the quality of ads and branding. 

Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). This most expensive approach provides detailed emotional responses, recall, and customer engagement. To perform the method, you need a lab. 

fMRI identifies blood flow in the brain during high neural activity. As a result, you receive information that helps improve branding and set prices.

Now that you know the methods you can use and which of them will help reach your goals, it’s time to realise that you too can access these same techniques as the big brands.

Although you probably don’t have access to the same equipment, these same principles can be applied to your marketing content. Foxdog Marketing can help assess how you can reach more customers, increase conversions and generate  leads.

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